In mdb and dbx, I get unknown symbols which tells me that I still have to work on the syntax. With adb, I kill the shadow process (ora-7445, SIGKILL on the function/symbol), but no trace file that I can find.

It would be really cool if Oracle included its own debugger, external to the database. Or if you could run oradebug without connecting to the instance (attaching, but not connecting via sqlplus).

I'll ask our sysadmins about gdb - I was hoping to use at least one of the three we already have, but I will do whatever it takes. =)
Thanks, Tanel,

"There might be a catch here. Such program will not work without some
values (like address of fixed table). These values may change after db
startup and are obtained using ordinary SQL (via sqlplus, for
example). So if we want to use program that directly read data from
SGA of hanged database, we need to preliminary read some values
sometimes before database hangs (for example, immediately after
startup)."

That is helpful to know. I am still stuck on the debugger, and my sysadmins
are not up to date with the latest debuggers we have, which are (Solaris 8):
dbx 6.2 (/opterp/ban7/SUNWspro/bin/dbx)
/bin/adb (unknown version)/bin/mdb (unknown version)